Loans

The government is quietly going ahead with its plan to become a major player in the economy, raising concerns in business circles.

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Lasco Financial Service Limited (LFSL) has tapped two of its business lines for expansion – payday loans and MoneyGram services -in search of revenue opportunities after signs in late summer that its income was stagnating.

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Abbotsford, WI, United States (AHN) – A Wisconsin man has posted a sign ‘No Negros Allowed’ on the door of the business he is planning on opening.

However, the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal to ban black people from admittance to the gentleman’s club Mark Prior is opening in Abbotsford, Wisconsin.

Wisconsin law also makes discrimination against people based on race illegal at a business open to the public.

Prior is defending his choice to discriminate against blacks by saying that he has had trouble with some people who were black in the past and that he decided he needed to make a policy against black people.

He said that although he did not think that all black people were a problem that he felt as a business owner that he had a right to make discriminatory policies because of past personal problems with a few individuals who were black. In addition, he has had problems with some white people who he also plans to ban.

Prior plans to open his business, a gentlemen’s club, which will be open to the public next to city hall and the library. His plans call for opening the business on Friday. Previously, Prior had plans to open his own sheriff’s department and a grocery store, but neither enterprise happened.

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New Delhi, India (AHN) – French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh witnessed on Monday the signing of a nuclear reactor purchase deal between two nuclear power firms from both countries.

Under the deal, the French state-controlled nuclear group Areva will supply India’s Nuclear Power Corporation with additional nuclear reactors worth $10 billion. The reactors will be built at Jaitapur in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

The Nuclear Power Corp. already operates 22 nuclear power stations but it is seeking to expand its domestic operation and open up a market estimated at £90bn over 15 years.

Sarkozy was in a four-day visit to India with his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Also with him are his defense, foreign and finance ministers as well as about 60 business leaders.

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ATLANTA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The U.S. Small Business Administration reminds eligible Private Non-Profit Organizations (PNPs) located in West Virginia that Dec. 29 is the deadline to submit loan applications. These Economic Injury Disaster Loans are available because of a severe storm, flooding, mudslides and landslides that occurred from March 12 through April 9, 2010. The SBA offers these loans to help meet working capital needs, such as ongoing operating expenses for eligible non-critical PNP org

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DUBLIN–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/396b32/consumer_finance) has announced the addition of the “Consumer Finance ” report to their offering. About 7,000 companies in the US engage primarily in making personal and payday loans to consumers, with combined annual revenue of about $180 billion. Large financing companies include Ally Financial, Ford Motor Credit, GM Financial (formerly AmeriCredit), and the retail finance division of GE Capital. C

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Manila, Philippines (AHN) – Philippine Airlines fought back on Thursday against a massive rally of workers at the nation’s business district protesting the carrier’s plan to lay off thousands of employees in a restructuring program.

“It cannot be business as usual: the global economic crisis of 2008 showed that airlines are in real danger of closure or bankruptcy without restructuring,” PAL spokesperson Cielo Villaluna said in a statement.

The airline announced last month it would outsource its airport services, call center and in-flight catering businesses. It is working on raising severance packages costing 2.5 billion pesos ($58.6 billion) to 2,600 employees, following the Labor Department’s decision allowing it to restructure its operations.

The PAL Employees Association had threatened to strike in response to the “contractualization” of workers by the carrier.

“PAL employees should not pay for PAL’s financial crisis since we did not cause it,” the group’s president, Gerry Rivera, has said. “Moreover the retrenchment will reduce PAL’s losses by an insignificant 7 percent. The real reason for the mass layoff is not to save PAL but to bust the union and replace regular jobs with contractual workers.”

Villaluna, however, insisted the restructuring is not contractualization. “Affected employees will be retired early and paid their separation benefits in accordance with the ruling of the Department of Labor and Employment. It’s entirely up to them [workers] if they want to join the new service providers or not,” she said the same day PALEA and other unions gathered in protest in Makati.

Asia’s first airline, PAL began its cost-cutting measures early this year to recoup losses from the global recession and continued weak performance of the airline industry worldwide. It prevented a cabin crew strike in September with the intervention of the government.

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Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (AHN) – Ottawa is planning to put in place massive spending cuts in a bid to give Canada’s economic recover a big push. Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was scheduled to outline the new economic policies in a speech Monday in Oakville, Ontario.

Ahead of his speech, Flaherty hinted there would be bitter pills for Canadians since the new policies would likely not be popular among residents. He insisted the proposed cuts seek to protect Canada’s advancement.

Flaherty stressed the measures are Ottawa’s way of preventing fiscal trouble in Canada similar to what is happening in Ireland. Ottawa plans to return to a balanced budget by 2016 through major cuts in key areas and ending the two-year $48-billion stimulus plan according to timetable.

Over the weekend, Flaherty hosted a consultation with business leaders in Toronto on how Canada’s Economic Action Plan will continue to shape the country’s economic future for next year’s budget. He acknowledged after the consultation that Canadians are concerned with the economy, jobs and their household budgets.

Ottawa is also getting feedback on four key issues from the public through online consultations which started Nov. 19.

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As EU experts dug through the books of Ireland’s debt-crippled banks, the question moved from whether Ireland will take an international bailout to under what conditions. |||

Dublin – As EU experts dug through the books of Ireland’s debt-crippled banks, the question moved from whether Ireland will take an international bailout to under what conditions.

On the firing line was Ireland’s prized low business tax, which the government says has lured 1 000 multinationals to Ireland over the past decade – but which it may have to give up to satisfy conditions of being rescued.

The Irish rescue is the latest act in Europe’s yearlong drama to prevent mounting debts and deficits from overwhelming the weakest members of the 16-nation eurozone. Greece was saved from bankruptcy in May, and analysts say Portugal could be next in line after Ireland for an EU-IMF lifeboat.

Officials on all sides cautioned that the Dublin talks could stretch into early December, after Ireland gives more clarity on its plans by publishing a four-year outline for slashing ¤15-billion (about R143.4-billion) from its deficit – forecast this year to reach a stupendous 32 percent of economic output.

The Irish government said the plan, to include ¤4.5-billion in cuts and ¤1.5-billion in new taxes for 2011 alone, will be published by Tuesday – but won’t include any change to its 12.5 percent rate of corporate tax, among the lowest in Europe.

Officials in Germany, France, Britain and Austria argue Ireland should be prepared to raise that rate to help pay off its debts. They say it’s not fair for Ireland to receive aid from EU partners while simultaneously sticking to a tax policy that amounts to unfair competition.

Ireland says the low tax policy is an essential anchor for keeping employers who generate a fifth of Ireland’s gross domestic product and provide the healthiest stream of tax revenue. Finance Minister Brian Lenihan, speaking ahead of Friday’s talks, said the defense of the 12.5 percent rate was “a red line” that Ireland would not allow the IMF to cross.

For Lenihan and Prime Minister Brian Cowen, the low corporate tax is one of the few points of unity with Ireland’s opposition Fine Gael party. Giving it up might be the death sentence for Cowen’s government, whose approval ratings are languishing at 11 percent.

But Ireland’s hand has been forced by a recent run on deposits at Irish banks, which are already receiving a minimum ¤45-billion bailout. Allied Irish Banks said Friday it has lost ¤13-billion ($18-billion), or 17 percent, of its total deposit base since June. It also announced plans to sell ¤6.6-billion ($9.05 billion) in new shares next month – likely taking the government’s stake in the bank from 18 percent to more than 90 percent.

The European Central Bank has been stemming deposit losses with short-term loans that have ballooned to a reported ¤130 billion, a quarter of the ECB’s eurozone loan book. But the ECB’s unlimited supply of liquidity to banks is likely to end as the central bank continues to phase out its financial crisis support measures, adding pressure on the Irish government.

Ireland’s representative on the Frankfurt-based bank, Irish Central Bank governor Patrick Honohan, said Thursday he expects Ireland to receive a credit line worth tens of billions of euro that would serve as a backstop for Irish banks struggling to access funds elsewhere.

Critics of Ireland’s low tax on business profits say raising it would be the quickest way to increase state income without hurting consumers. According to Eurostat, corporate tax rates in the eurozone average 25.7 percent, and only Cyprus and Bulgaria are lower than Ireland with rates of 10 percent.

Germany and France, whose rates stand at 29.8 percent and 34.4 percent respectively, have spent the past decade grumbling as some of their own companies and a disproportionate share of US multinationals choose Ireland as their EU headquarters.

“There’s only one real reason for that, namely the avoidance of taxes,” said Markus Ferber, a member of the European Parliament for the German Christian Social Union, part of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coalition.

Some go even further, saying that the low corporate tax rate was central to Ireland’s economic collapse.

“Ireland has constructed its development strategy for many years not on attracting large-scale corporate investment, but on corporate headquarters activity,” said John Christensen, an economist and accountant who heads the Tax Justice Network, an nonprofit that advocates more transparent tax policies.

Dublin’s “beggar-thy-neighbour tax policy” is helping large corporations shift profits to tax havens outside Europe, hurting both the Irish government and Europe as a whole, Christensen said.

Irish business lobbyists say it would be crazy for the former Celtic Tiger to increase taxes on foreign investors at the moment when Ireland is shedding domestic jobs and depending on high-tech exporters to lead a recovery.

“Higher rates would mean less revenue for the state, as investment and jobs have the potential to move to countries outside the EU. This would not be in Irish interests or in the interest of the wider EU,” said Danny McCoy, director of the Irish Business and Employers Confederation, which represents 7 500 employers.

But many more Irish people express disbelief that – in the midst of a crisis caused by Dublin bankers who gambled hundreds of billions on property deals gone bust – the government is bailing out those same banks and defending profits for wealthy multinationals like Microsoft, Intel and Google.

The Reverend Sean Healy, a Catholic priest who leads a pressure group called Social Justice Ireland, called the government focus on protecting bondholders and Fortune 500 companies “hypocritical and deeply unjust.”

“By taking so many things off the table, the IMF and the government have created a situation where most of the adjustments will be made at the expense of the weak, the sick, the vulnerable and the working poor,” Healy said.

There were few signs on Friday of protest on the streets of Dublin, only private expressions of shock and disgust that Ireland’s economy had been mismanaged so badly and fallen so quickly since 2008.

“There’s no point protesting. We’ve gambled away our sovereignty, and all we can do is try not to make matters worse,” said Eamon Delaney, a newspaper vendor. “Our own leaders have made such a shambles of it, the IMF crowd will hardly do worse.” – AP

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Diversified Financial and its owner have skirted residential mortgage requirements and disclosures by writing up loans as “commercial.” But a Pierce County, Wash., judge pro tem determined that the lender misrepresented a residential loan as commercial and ordered a payment to the borrower of $211,538. A judge in another county ruled that the lender’s actions were in “bad faith,” ordered $110,932 in damages and awarded the borrower the home back free-and-clear.

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